SiFive launched a chinese subsidiary (StarFive) in
2017/2018. And they just announced they were giving
designs for some of their high-end cores to Sophgo (a
company out of Beijing.) My guess is US administrators
want SiFive to apply for export licenses before they do
this again.
I pretty much agree w/ Bunnie on this one. I lived
through the Crypto(graphy) Wars of 90s and still have
my "Sink Clipper" poster around here somewhere. If US
companies are trying to sell products and services
based on technology they can't export, but foreign
countries can easily replicate, the only thing you're
doing is making them (US tech companies) operate at a
disadvantage.
If we were worried about foreign tech dominance, then
maybe we could do what foreign countries do:
a. Develop a national industrial policy.
b. Pay for kids to get EE degrees. (or hell, pay for
kids to get business or art degrees.)
c. Subsidize the chip manufacturing sector the same
way we subsidize farmers or petroleum marketers.
d. Force Samsung and TSMC (both foreign countries) to
form joint ventures with US firms where US
countries own at least 51% of the JV.
Claiming they can close the Pandora's Box of
semiconductor manufacturing knowledge this late in the
game makes them (US Lawmakers) look incompetent. If
they wanted to "save US chip manufacturing" they should
have done something in the 1970s when TI was building
manufacturing plants in Malaysia and Thailand.
Samsung and TSMC may be in foreign countries, but the key thing is both South Korea and Taiwan are very closely aligned with the United States for defense.
This concern is less about the chips being made here, but controlling the ability for enemy powers to get a hold of them. Consider that "bombing the TSMC facilities" has been considered a possible plan if Taiwan is invaded, because a key goal is ensuring China doesn't control that capability.
Do you trade with the enemy? That's a traitor's domain. Or they're rather competitors you are not happy with and scared that they beat you at the game? Get off you butt and do something productive then.
> Do you trade with the enemy? That's a traitor's domain. Or they're rather competitors you are not happy with and scared that they beat you at the game?
Both can be true at the same time, e.g. Europe buying gas and oil from Russia. Realpolitik is often very messy to navigate, not made easier by the fact that we have collectively decided to tie our fates to Russia (for cheap energy) and China (for cheap production) and that decision is coming back home with a vengeance.
If you are looking for traitors, start with those who thought "change by trade" in the 90s/early 00s was a good idea - and check their paychecks. At least here in Germany, we know that disgraced former Chancellor Schröder is a Russian asset (literally, he got a high-paid job for Rosneft, most likely as a thank-you for pushing through Nord Stream), unfortunately he was clever enough to never implicate himself in a criminally chargeable manner.
>"unfortunately he was clever enough to never implicate himself in a criminally chargeable manner."
This just confirms that they were not enemies. Enemies want to exterminate each other. And trading with the official enemy is a crime last time I checked. I do not think Germany or Russia wanted that. They're neither friends nor enemies, both just looking how to exploit each other.
As I understand it, the U.S. does not subsidize petroleum marketers, or at least not very much. Oil companies are generally taxed on net income after expenses and depreciation, same as all other businesses.
Plus depletion, which like depreciation reflects the value of an asset going down over time, making the company in question worth less than it would be otherwise, i.e. the book value is going down.
"Calculating the cost of U.S. subsidies for the fossil fuel industry is complex because the incentives stretch across the U.S. tax code, but estimates range from $10 to $50 billion per year."
"U.S. oil and gas subsidies include provisions ranging from incentives for domestic production, write-offs and deductions tied to foreign production and income, and approved accounting methods that can reduce the stated taxable value of assets."
"One specific U.S. tax break on domestic production, for example, called intangible drilling costs, allows producers to deduct a majority of their costs from drilling new wells. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan panel of Congress, has estimated that eliminating it could generate $13 billion for the public coffers over 10 years."
"Another, the percentage depletion tax break, which allows independent producers to recover development costs of declining oil gas and coal reserves, could generate about $12.9 billion in revenue over 10 years, according to the panel."
Whether tax deductions are subsidies or not depends on whether they are targeted at and benefit particular industries or special interests in a way that others do not qualify for.
Right now we’re having an anti-PRC moment. There are good and intelligent ways to have that moment, and there bad and stupid ways to have that moment. This is one of the latter, but Congress is a deliberative body within a free democracy so we’re going to see all of it.
Something to look out for in recent years are cultist grassroot investors who organize on Reddit and Twitter to influence politicians to do something that is favorable to their stock and harass journalists and YouTubers who report critically and harm their stock.
r/TeslaInvestors and r/AMD_Stock are some of the worst. I can easily imagine some in the latter organizing to get RISC-V banned in the US.
Eh. RISC-V isn't really competing with AMD64, which is high performance processors that can natively run x86 binaries, neither of which RISC-V would do any time soon. And if there were they would most likely be made by AMD, who would then make money selling them.
The loser from RISC-V is clearly ARM because it's not nearly as hard to produce a low-power processor with mid-level performance, which is the core of ARM's market but RISC-V allows the vendors to avoid paying for the ARM license. And unlike x86, most existing ARM software isn't distributed as third party binaries tied to a particular architecture and could easily be recompiled for something else.
TBD, but there is nothing magic about RISC-V that would make this possible if it wasn't already possible with ARM. Apple has even done it with ARM, but to date no one else has. And if someone else did, it wouldn't really matter to AMD if it was RISC-V or ARM.
Wonder how much of the pro-Elon nonsense I see here, on Twitter and Reddit is just stockholders who got rich off of Tesla. I like to think that there is some sophisticated automated ML system Elon has got running to find and respond to haters....but then I saw that Youtube video discussing the poor code at Tesla so I dont know what to think anymore.
It's pretty obvious what causes this for both companies. You have companies that were previously in a precarious position, which attracts interest from short sellers who think the company will fail, but instead the company makes money. Then all the people holding a short position get desperate to drive the stock price down so they can close their position without losing their shirts, so they keep attacking the company well past the point that there is no reasonable expectation they're going to go bankrupt anymore.
That makes the company's supporters intolerant of criticism because they've been conditioned to expect criticism to be in bad faith. Which continues even after the short sellers have given up or been eviscerated by margin calls.
You make a good point. I was a lurker on the "RealTesla" and "Teslamotors" subreddits during the whole 2016-2020 saga. So many nutjobs on both sides of the aisle. And more importantly, both sides were very wrong on some things and very right on other things. That was the take away I got from that era.
I wonder how much of the anti-Elon posts I see here, on Twitter and Reddit are just NPCs who have been told to hate a person and regurgitate talking points designed in a lab. I’m pretty sure the answer is 80-90%. I’m also not an Elon fanboy nor have I ever owned Tesla. It just really woke me up seeing the entire internet flip against Elon so quickly and it having been so obviously inorganic.
If you are looking for Anti-Elon content you'll find it. Others have seen the car teardowns and know that somehow his companies manage to produce excellent engineering(at least in some departments). Its possible to both hate him and like him at the same time(for different reasons).
How do you know it's ARM though? Taking low-cost potshots at China is an easy choice for some conservative politicians, there's a large number of voters/small $ donors who are easily activated by the claim to 'standing up to communism'.
The concern is that open-sourcing processor design knowledge will create a "reverse brain drain", allowing other countries (especially the boogeyman China) to catch up. It's nonsense in a globalized world.
Why would it make sense to ban it in the US? They literally invented it.